I think your last paragraph is the key point here. Forget about QI; MWI says some small fraction of your future measure will be alive very far into the future (for ever? depends on difficult cosmological questions); even objective-collapse theories say that this holds with nonzero but very small probability (which I suggest you should feel exactly the same way about); every theory, quantum or otherwise, says that at no point will you experience being dead-and-unable-to-experience things; all QI seems to me to add to this is a certain attitude.
Another interpretation is that it is a name for an implication of MWI that a even many people who fully accept MWI seem to somehow miss (or deny, for some reason; just have a look at discussions in relevant Reddit subs, for example).
Objective-collapse theories in a spatially or temporally infinite universe or with eternal inflation etc. actually say that it holds with nonzero but very small probability, but essentially give it an infinite number of chances to happen, meaning that this scenario is for all practical purposes identical to MWI. But I think what you are saying can be supposed to mean something like “if the world was like the normal intuitions of most people say it is like”, in which case I still think there’s a world of difference between very small probability and very small measure.
I’m not entirely convinced by the usual EY/LW argument that utilitarianism can be salvaged in an MWI setting by caring about measure, but I can understand it and find it reasonable. But when this is translated to a first-person view, I find it difficult. The reason I believe that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning is not because my past observations indicate that it will happen in a majority of “branches” (“branches” or “worlds” of course not being a real thing, but a convenient shorthand), but because it seems like the most likely thing for me to experience, given past experiences. But if I’m in a submarine with turchin and x-risk is about to be realized, I don’t get how I could “expect” that I will most likely blow up or be turned into a pile of paperclips like everyone else, while I will certainly (and only) experience it not happening. If QI is an attitude, and a bad one too, I don’t understand how to adopt any other attitude.
Actually, I think there are at least a couple of variations of this attitude: the first one that people take upon first hearing of the idea and giving it some credibility is basically “so I’m immortal, yay; now I could play quantum russian roulette and make myself rich”; the second one, after thinking about it a bit more, is much more pessimistic; there are probably others, but I suppose you could say that underneath there is this core idea that somehow it makes sense to say “I’m alive” if even a very small fraction of my original measure still exists.
I think your last paragraph is the key point here. Forget about QI; MWI says some small fraction of your future measure will be alive very far into the future (for ever? depends on difficult cosmological questions); even objective-collapse theories say that this holds with nonzero but very small probability (which I suggest you should feel exactly the same way about); every theory, quantum or otherwise, says that at no point will you experience being dead-and-unable-to-experience things; all QI seems to me to add to this is a certain attitude.
Another interpretation is that it is a name for an implication of MWI that a even many people who fully accept MWI seem to somehow miss (or deny, for some reason; just have a look at discussions in relevant Reddit subs, for example).
Objective-collapse theories in a spatially or temporally infinite universe or with eternal inflation etc. actually say that it holds with nonzero but very small probability, but essentially give it an infinite number of chances to happen, meaning that this scenario is for all practical purposes identical to MWI. But I think what you are saying can be supposed to mean something like “if the world was like the normal intuitions of most people say it is like”, in which case I still think there’s a world of difference between very small probability and very small measure.
I’m not entirely convinced by the usual EY/LW argument that utilitarianism can be salvaged in an MWI setting by caring about measure, but I can understand it and find it reasonable. But when this is translated to a first-person view, I find it difficult. The reason I believe that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning is not because my past observations indicate that it will happen in a majority of “branches” (“branches” or “worlds” of course not being a real thing, but a convenient shorthand), but because it seems like the most likely thing for me to experience, given past experiences. But if I’m in a submarine with turchin and x-risk is about to be realized, I don’t get how I could “expect” that I will most likely blow up or be turned into a pile of paperclips like everyone else, while I will certainly (and only) experience it not happening. If QI is an attitude, and a bad one too, I don’t understand how to adopt any other attitude.
Actually, I think there are at least a couple of variations of this attitude: the first one that people take upon first hearing of the idea and giving it some credibility is basically “so I’m immortal, yay; now I could play quantum russian roulette and make myself rich”; the second one, after thinking about it a bit more, is much more pessimistic; there are probably others, but I suppose you could say that underneath there is this core idea that somehow it makes sense to say “I’m alive” if even a very small fraction of my original measure still exists.